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As you may know from the Twitterverse, for the past four months we’ve worked tirelessly to build a DIY sous vide kit. And here is the prototype! You can join our e-mail list to receive the first 100.

The idea was to replace the JLD-612+relay combination with something a bit more advanced and polished. We created a compact brain that is flexible enough for any type of temperature control— whether it be a sous vide, smoker, refrigerator, or even a solder reflow oven. You can easily attach the enclosure to whatever you want to hack. We attached ours to a coffee urn, which is perfect for sous viding because it is designed for convection and has a large water reserve. We relabeled it “Meat Jacuzzi” for its amazing tenderizing properties because we’re crazy.

We used an Atmega 328 chip with the Arduino bootloader to do PID control and a Crydom solid state relay with an integrated heatsink to do power switching. There is also an onboard power supply to convert the AC into DC for the control and display.

We recommend measuring the temperature with a thermistor, which we include in our $80 dollar kit, but there is also space for an amplifier circuit in case you want to use a thermocouple or Pt-100 RTD probe.

An awesome feature about the kit is that our board is easy to program with an FTDI cable. You can interface with your computer and record data, or modify the code however you want.